Drupal Module Spotlight: Reroute Email

“Excuse me, Mr./Mrs. Client, I’m so sorry but I accidentally just sent your 3000 users a fake purchase email receipt when I was testing.”

Ugh.

Big complex systems are a lot to keep track of, especially when it comes to email. There are emails for resetting passwords, emails for new users, email receipts, email notifications for workflows, etc, and it’s frankly a little terrifying to rely on yourself to remember all the implications of what’s going on when working on local environments, or test servers or anywhere but production. All you have to do to experience this pain is trigger an accidental FAKE email send to REAL people.

That’s where modules like today’s spotlight comes in.

We’re talking about the Reroute Email module, a simple plugin that allows you to override all outbound email sending and send them to a configured address, allowing you to both test that email content is working but not have to apologize to all of your users.

Installation is simply turning the module on and then going to the configuration page at /admin/config/development/reroute_email. From there, you can set the rerouting email addresses and even set whitelisting emails that are permitted to pass through the reroute.

This is helpful for situations where you want to use test emails for specific purposes and you want the emails to go out as they will in production without having all email functionality enabled on your site. Pretty great. Lastly, you can even enter module key patterns so that emails coming from particular modules are the only ones being rerouted. Very flexible.

And a special note: On many of our sites, we set the config for the module in the local settings files for each environment so we can ensure, for example, that local or test environments never send real emails even if we pull code or refresh the database from production. It’s as simple as the following lines of code: